Food holding cabinets are used to maintain optimal cooked food product temperatures until the food product is served. Individual trays are loaded into shelf-like row assemblies within the cabinet with heating plates. Cooks within a restaurant typically cook food in small batches likely beyond the immediate need of the product. This excess food is placed in a tray within a holding cabinet shelf that is used to maintain the temperature of that food product until served. Various food products are typically cooked at different times (perhaps staggered in time). Thus, normal operational load is that of normal holding of already loaded food product as well as newly loaded food product creating additional periodic load. The wattage of the heaters is sized to properly maintain food quality and temperature.
To better understand the problem, well over 100,000 holding cabinets exist in the field. Over time, the restaurants that use these holding cabinets have become densely populated with more equipment and at the same time, have increased their menu choices. Both of these drivers have created a need to provide more food storage within the existing holding cabinet space. Adding additional row assemblies or cabinet slots to existing holding cabinets increases the number of heaters. Depending on the number of cabinet slots, it is possible that the plurality of heater demands could exceed the branch circuit limitations to the cabinet (for example, at morning cabinet start up and unusually high load times) thereby tripping the circuit breaker.
Thus, there is a need for limiting total cabinet power consumption to electrical power distribution capabilities.